WETANo shiny space suit for Klaatu -- er, Keanu -- Reeves, whose arrival on Earth triggers a global upheaval in the "reinvention" of "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

The Day the Earth Stood Still (PG-13) Fox (110 min.) Directed by Scott Derrickson. With Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly. Opens Friday at theaters in New Jersey. ONE AND A HALF STARS

Klaatu. Barada. Nik ... Whoa.

Fans of classic science-fiction -- or even of Ringo Starr album covers -- have strong memories of the image, a brushed-metal flying saucer landing in Washington to disgorge Gort, a towering robot, and Klaatu, an imperturbable alien ready to unleash violence to ensure peace.

But now "The Day the Earth Stood Still" has been remade. And this time the strange visitor from another planet is -- Keanu Reeves?

This remake is being called a "reinvention," and it's true that there are changes beyond replacing the late Michael Rennie and giving the heroine a more active role. In the first, 1951 film, Klaatu came to warn us about nuclear armageddon. Here, it's the ecology.

The basic idea is that we're ruining the Earth, a vital part of the galactic eco-system. So, an interplanetary council has made the only logical decision: Exterminate one species in order to save the rest. Klaatu, it seems, is the Terminix man, and we are the vermin he's been sent to wipe out.

This isn't a bad twist, although it would be nice if the film once mentioned the words "global warming," "toxic waste" or even just "pollution." Why bring up the topic if you're afraid to address it? It's as if the script were sketched out by Al Gore, then handed off to corporate lobbyists for a rewrite.

After a peculiar Himalayan prologue, the movie starts in earnest with the alien's arrival. Making the metaphor part of the production design, Klaatu arrives not in a flying saucer but in a planetary globe; he wears not a space suit, but a second, soon-shed placental skin. (Gort, happily, looks much the same -- only supersized.)

Once Klaatu arrives in Central Park, though, he's immediately shot by a nervous military; escaping from their secret hospital, with the number of a sympathetic physician, he runs to Jersey, where he calls her from Newark Penn. It's rush hour, it seems, and he's feeling pained and confused. (And who can't relate to that?)

This is where things start to fall apart, though, as the couple drives haphazardly around the state and the good doctor tries to talk him out of genocide -- at one point bringing him to her own fave professor, a Nobel Prize winner in "biological altruism." But little of this makes sense.

Why does Klaatu abandon his plan to address the U.N.? Why doesn't he just give us a safe source of clean energy? And if he'd determined to exterminate us anyway, why is he so careful not to kill his pursuers?

What trendy remakers don't realize is that the creative DNA of a classic movie is as complicated as that of the people who made it; change one element, and you risk ruining everything. And by substituting pollution for nuclear weapons, the filmmakers have thrown the movie off its axis.

Reeves remains monotonously dazed as Klaatu, although his affectless delivery actually works here; Jennifer Connelly is, as usual, the prettiest crying woman in the movies (although I don't know if I quite buy her as a world-renowned Princeton astrobiologist). The rest of the cast is, hopefully, forgettable.

Give "The Day the Earth Stood Still" points for its clever look, and some dazzling shots of Gort. (A sequence in which a military man tries -- foolishly -- to take a drill to him is particularly good.) But the dialogue is often as clumsy as the product placement, and the rushed resolution is a mad embrace of Luddite panic that's opposed to everything Klaatu seems to stand for.

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" may bill itself as science fiction. But it understands neither.